Blogging and Social Media: 26+ New Startups

Everyday, you may find new tools to make blogging easier or more complicated.  More and more “social” tools are being created to help bridge the gap between your online and offline life, making it easier to communicate and socialize with one another without ever needing to meet face-to-face.  

It can be quite daunting with all the new beta programs launching on a daily basis, so you need to sort through the ones that will lead to an increase in productivity and those that are simply a nuisance.  If the site requires you to sign up, you must factor in the long-term usefulness of the service - will you be using it on a daily basis or is it something that just adds another site to your list of sites that require a password?

Here are a few of the new blogging tools and services, found throughout the blogosphere and on Killer Startups.  Many of these build upon other sites - Twitter, FriendFeed, and others, but are all targeted towards webmasters and bloggers alike.  Be sure to check some of them out, most of them can be quite useful or beneficial in your blogging routine.

Note: A few of the services listed below are not new, but have recently been updated or have become renewed resources for bloggers.

1. AddTweets - This free service allows you to add your latest tweets to your blog or website using a small piece of JavaScript code.  Some of the limitations and requirements include that you must use your Twitter nickname and email to use the service, and the maximum tweets displayed on your bog is ten.  The interface is clean, although the site has little purpose other than to ad the widget to your site, which could be done with a widget/plugin.  However, it does save time in the long-run as you won’t need to login to check your feeds nearly as often - just go to your website or blog.

2. Blawg - Blawg is a resource and directory of legal blogs.  You can find information related to terms of blogging and copyright information to general legal terminology.

3. BlogGears - At BlogGears, much like TechCrunch Pitches, allows any blog owner to record a video message to pitch your blog to the world.  It allows readers to become familiar with the messages and motives of the bloggers who feature their pitch on the site as well as discover new blogs.  Videos must be hosted on YouTube or any or blog service, must be under ninety seconds, and only one video per blog per month can be added to the site.  To date, at least ten blog owners have submitted their pitch to the world.  Add yours today!

4. Bust A Blog - A new service that allows members to create a free @.bustablog.com blog, with more than 100 templates to choose from, widgets, and the ability to make an unlimited number of free accounts.  Ads are placed on your blog, which allows you to make money from the unique content that is produced.  Money making tutorials are available and the owners will help you optimize your site for search engines and for others to read.  You can also use your current blog and syndicate your articles, increasing your exposure and allowing you to get 60% profit share.

5. Cubestat - This service is a quick way to check the value and estimation of your site’s worth.  While results may not be as accurate as if you were to sell your blog or website to someone, it provides a quick way to check your blog’s stats from Alexa and Compete, too.

6. Edicy - Edicy is a free/paid service that allows you to quickly build and edit websites or blogs.  Many of the site/blog designs and parts of the interface resemble that of WordPress and Blogger, but it does have a more attractive appearance and interface than those two services.  You can seamlessly use any domain with Edicy.  Other features include a streamlined account area, autosave and archives of every page, easily create news and blogs, quality templates, multiple uploading, drag and drop galleries, and the “best web editor ever built.”

7. Feedly - There are countless Firefox extensions and add-ons available, making it one of the most popular browsers for creating and sharing web content.  However, Feedly is a social magazine start page for Firefox, allowing you to personalize and add content and bookmarks from My Yahoo!, Bloglines, Netvibes, Twitter, Yahoo Mail, Gmail, and FriendFeed; add news and popular stories based on your interests, reading patterns, and recommendations from your friends; share articles with friends; use Twitter right from the extension, plus numerous other functions.  In addition, it can take the place of Google Reader as your main feed reader.  

8. FellowReaders - A social network that allows you to access your favorite online media content through a personalized RSS feed subscription that you can create or read that has been created by the site.  You can also keep track of what others are reading and connect with people with the same interest.  You can rate, comment, and share stories that are on the service, and it also displays the time that the story was submitted/aggregated and the source.  The only thing I found negative about the site is the fact that it is bordering on advertisement heavy status - seven different ad areas on the main page, five banners and two Google AdSense blocks.

9. eBizValuations - This service is another website valuation tool based on a large database of real sales, making it “the most accurate” free online website valuation tool.  It requires more input than other services based on your domain name, Technorati ranking, and PageRank, but presents an estimated price if sold at auction and the confidence level that the sale price will be plus or minus 10% of the estimated price.  You can also add your contact information if you want potential buyers to request additional information about your site if they want to purchase it.

10. Hihera - Hihera is a relatively new site that allows you to create and host a free forum.  Although the main page of the site doesn’t appear complete, you can instantly sign up to receive unlimited bandwidth, unlimited size, 99.99% uptime, 24/7 support, custom modifications, and constant upgrades.  Beyond these features, there aren’t many additional resources - no dedicated support forum (contact form/email only), or area to see the additions you can add to your forum.  

11. Mloovi RSS and Blog Translator - The Mloovi RSS blog translator builds into the Google Translate service, which allows you to translate any blog or RSS feed into more than twenty-four languages.  It is useful if you want to reach a wider audience by generating an RSS feed in the language of your choice, so visitors can subscribe to that feed instead of your English (or other language) feed.  The one downside: there are ads in your feed.  ”Mloovi” is Czech for the word ‘to speak.’

12. Monitter - A slick interface for displaying recent tweets from around the world of Twitter.  You can track up to three keywords (displayed on the main page), find tweets within 10-100 km/m of your location, and add the functionality through the use of a widget on your site.  The entire site has been built on the TweetDeck and PopUrls concepts.

13. MyPage - MyPage is (yet) another free service that allows you to create blogs, wikis, websites, socialize with others using the service, or add chat rooms and widgets/applications to your site.  There are numerous additional features, including the ability to promote your site through their own ad network, create your own communities, or monetize your site using AdSense or the Amazon Associates program.

14. MyTextFile - A simple, AJAX-powered online text editor with the ability to edit and view a single text document - no rich formatting or additional editing items.  You are allowed to use up to 256KB per file, save multiple versions, and sign in from your Google Account. This service is ideal for people who prefer to use a different version of their blog editor or simply need a private document where they can store notes.

15. Observu - Observu is an extremely simple, no-frills site that monitors your website and server for free.  You are notified by email if one of them goes down, resulting in immediate notification if your site goes down.  You share little information with the site besides your email and password.  No limit on the sites that can be monitored.  One negative of the site is the fact that it doesn’t even offer a simple tracker of total uptime (in percent) for your site and there is no control over the update interval.  The site is also owned by a fairly large company, Moving Labs, ensuring that the service will be updated.  

16. Plerb - A simple, free micro-blogging service that allows you to share thoughts with friends or new people.  The service is somewhat like Twitter, but displays all thoughts/comments on the front page, leaving little room for control of individual users.  Until the site becomes larger, there aren’t many conversations going on the main page. 

17. Regator - Somewhat like Digg, StumbleUpon, and other social bookmarking and sharing sites, Regator gathers and organzies a few of the best posts and places them on the site.  You can vote on posts, share them, find related articles, and leave your thoughts on the posts.  The site works the way it is supposed to with a rather sleek look to the whole site.  An additional aspect of the site is the ability to search for audio and video results and view “what’s hot.”

18. ShareMeme - This service allows you to stay in touch with people who use services that you use on an everyday basis.  You can send invites, polls and links from a text message or the web through any method via ShareMeme and it’ll get to their inbox, no matter what network or service they happen to be using.  The main advantage of this service for bloggers is that it helps you organize a central inbox or contact area, much like Ping.fm, which helps you keep all your social profiles updated.

19. SocialGO - A free site that allows you to create your own social network.  Many of the features, including custom member profiles, messaging, video chat, sub-groups, events, photo sharing, discussion forums, new aggregators, and blogging tools, are similar to MySpace and Facebook.  You need to upgrade to a Premium account if you want to receive additional bandwidth, monetize your site, remove ads, or use your own domain.  However, given the choice, this network gives you more control over your preferences than the big names, and may add a welcome addition to your blog for growing a community. 

20. StumbleRead - StumbleRead allows you to view your FriendFeed in the left pane and the sites that are mentioned in the right area.  There aren’t many features, but the site doesn’t require an additional sign-up, just your FriendFeed information.  However, there are already browser-side extensions that can do a similar task as this site, however it does a good job at what it’s supposed to.

21. TextFixer - Text Fixer is a website featuring a powerful, yet useful and easy-to-use tools for modifying and converting text for use on the web or on websites.  A few of the tools include the ability to remove line breaks, capitalize sentences, convert line break to the paragraph or break tag, uncompress HTML, or create a JavaScript pop-up window maker.  There could be a few more tools added, but it offers a decent set as of now.

Warning: If you have some sort of hatred towards Twitter or don’t use the service, the following section of new startups may not be worth your time reading.

22. ToAnswer - A Twitter-based mini-application, this service allows you to answer questions.  The service is simple to use - sign into your Twitter account, follow the ToAsk and ToAnswer Twitter accounts, then pose your question in the @ToAsk Question? or answer others’ questions using the @ToAnswer [question id] Answer. Your questions and/or responses will appear on the site for others to read or answer.

23. Twiffid - Twiffid automatically detects the feeds of the websites your Twitter friends have listed in their Twitter profile and aggregates them on this site in a similar format.  Feeds are fetched and cached on their server.  As your Twitter account information isn’t stored on their servers, it is safe to sign in and use the free service.  It makes it easy to stay on top of what your friends are blogging about. 

24. TwitHire - A free job listing service for Twitter, this service is extremely clean and simple to use, simply fill out the “Post a Job Tweet” form using your Twitter ID.  The site is currently monetized using AdSense at the bottom of the main page, but I could see them moving to a free/paid listing allowing employers to get priority over recently posted jobs, especially as the service grows and dozens of job listings are posted each day.  The site caters to design and programming jobs or “other” at the moment, but may also expand.  They have plans of supporting other popular micro-blogging services including Jaiku and Pownce.

25. Twitscoop - This service was built to help you stay on top of Twitter’s hot topics and discussions.  The site will crawl hundreds of tweets every minute and extract the words that are used/mentioned most often.  On the main page, the tag cloud will reflect the most used terms and list hot trends.  For bloggers and news sites, this service will deliver graphs and recent tweets, indicating trends in the amount that each term is referenced.

26. Twitt’d - Twitt’d allows you to receive and send updates using your favorite instant messenger - Skype, Windows Live Messenger, Jabber/Google Talk, or Yahoo! Messenger.  You simply add Twitt’d to your buddy list and say “hi”, then the service will request your Twitter username and password, and you’ll be able to use the service.  It allows you to update your Twitter profile (via Tweets) on a more convenient schedule.

Conclusion

While this is a fairly complete collection of new services and tools that have been created/revised within the past few months, do you have any others that you would like featured in this list that you use?  (They should be recent additions, at that.)  I could also go more in-depth with a select service from the list above if you are the owner of the service and would like to get more word out about it.

Don’t forget to try out any of the services mentioned above.